If you missed the past two days, here’s what’s going on:
Today’s action step was:
“I don’t really have a welcome email sequence in place 👉🏻 I’ll select my favorite past newsletter issues and design a nice little sequence new subscribers will receive automatically. So we curate their experience better and offer more value right away”
Now, I’m all for offering value, but I had to stop and think twice about this.
It’s easy to get carried away with excitement and just implement stuff.
You know it if you run a business.
As with any of my copywriting work, the first (not-so) secret to doing a good job, is to get into your audience’s shoes.
So I did that, even before doing any of what I planned for.
And I said to myself:
“Ok, I just signed up for a daily newsletter that I will be able to quickly read in 2 minutes a day. What would I want to get that would make this an even better experience?“
The answer wasn’t an automated email sequence or more emails.
My readers – you – are receiving these every day already. Getting your daily email + another one from past issues it’s unlikely to be on your wish list.
At least not right out of the gate, after you just signed up and still have no idea what these emails will be like.
I hate overwhelm and don’t want you to go through it.
So what am I doing instead?
I decided to get a head start on the last step of my plan:
“I don’t have an incentive, or small, actionable product people can download when subscribing” 👉🏻 I’ll be collecting past issues into one (to start) ebook, nicely presented and easy to digest.
An ebook that, most importantly will promise and deliver a very specific result to readers.
This should motivate more visitors to sign up, as they will not only get the daily content, but an instant freebie, packed with value.
Which will also help with setting expectations for the type of content they will get in the following days.
So, step one for this today, was to work with my assistant to categorize/tag all my daily newsletters (210 issues with this one so far) by topics.
Things like:
- Research
- Understanding people
- Buyer psychology
- Decision making
- Business and entrepreneurship
- Sales and marketing
- Positioning
- Life lessons
- Lessons from media (TV, books, etc)
- UX design
- Branding
- Client and customer management or experience
- etc.
Then I’ll pick one for the first ebook and create it.
I already started brainstorming some of the branding in Canva (work in progress):
Another thing on the list, once the ebook is ready will be – based on the categories and tags we have – to segment my subscribers using that data.
Right now I’m already doing simple segmentation (you might have noticed) with my welcome email, where I ask you how you would describe yourself:
I’m still not sure how I will use the data together with the opt in ebooks, but it will be a good way to think of what’s best to offer. Maybe even send new subscribers a different ebook based on the topic they pick? We’ll see.
Main lessons for today:
- it’s great to get ideas spinning, but always leave some space for incubation before implementing them.
- Put yourself in your audience’s shoes before jumping to conclusions.
- Think long term: what’s an asset you can start working on today that will deliver value to both your audience and your business automatically, over time?
- Always, always try to collect data on who your people are. If you’re not doing it (or if you think you should revisit the way you’re doing it), set a reminder now.
That’s it for today.
The plan for tomorrow:
“I still don’t have any sort of analytics installed on my site 👉🏻 I’ll install Google Analytics and Hotjar on my site so we can look at what people do on the site when they land from the sponsored ad. And we can adjust for anything that’s not working”
Stay tuned.
Quote and reflection of the day:
“Telling effective stories is not easy. The difficulty lies not in telling the story, but in convincing everyone else to believe it. Much of history revolves around this question: how does one convince millions of people to believe particular stories about gods, or nations, or limited liability companies? Yet when it succeeds, it gives Sapiens immense power, because it enables millions of strangers to cooperate and work towards common goals.” – Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens
Persuasion is part of our evolution and a skill worth mastering. It can be used for good and evil, so it’s up to us to make the distinction. Only know that unless you know how to tell effective, convincing stories, other people will tell you theirs and try to convince you. Knowing how to persuade is both offense and defense. It’s a tool for life.
P.S. Looking for personalized help with anything copy/UX and CRO for your business? I recently started working 1 on 1 with folks and it’s been a blast.
